The Government Digital Service (GDS) has agreed a contract with Firetext Communications as an SMS provider within the GOV.UK Notify platform.
They have reached an agreement to last for two years with a value of up to £98 million with options for an extension.
The award follows a procurement process in which GDS has looked for a top two scoring suppliers of SMS to share the same sub-processes for the service, which is used to send emails, text messages and letters to users of central government services.
GDS has used two integrated SMS suppliers to provide resilience, with traffic shared between the two based on speed of processing and load.
The earlier tender notice stated: “To meet Notify's SMS redundancy requirements the suppliers should utilise independent computing and network infrastructures throughout their respective end-end services, avoiding any single points of failure that could simultaneously impact both providers.”
According to the information page for Notify, it is now used by over 1,700 organisations for more than 10,000 services. The earlier tender notice said it is being used to send an average of three million SMS fragments per day and is forecasts to send 3.8 billion over 205-26 and 3.9 billion during 2026-27.
